Paper accepted in Attention, Perception & Psychophysics
Be on the lookout for "Talker adaptation or 'talker' adaptation? Musical instrument variability impedes pitch perception" in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. For decades, researchers have explored speech perception by comparing adaptation to a single talker (which often produced fast and highly accurate responses) to weakened adaptation to variable talkers (which often produced slower and/or less accurate responses). Speech-specific theories have been developed based on this processing, but we asked whether this adaptation was more general in nature. Rather than perceiving speech from different talkers, we had listeners perceive pitches from one or multiple musical instruments. The same patterns of results occurred, which support a general auditory mechanism that adjusts to consistency and/or overcomes variability in auditory input. Additionally, aspects of performance were significantly correlated with years of musical training, which has sparked a new and exciting direction for this research - stay tuned for more!